Failed Projects: Open Mosaic

The goal of this project was to recreate an image as a mosaic of other images. I wanted to achieve this with a low number of tiles and not simply use images as pixels based on their colors.

Mistakes

The biggest mistake I made was to vastly underestimate the difficulty of the problem. I thought I could get good results by tuning my early histogram grid implementation and floundered. I have seen many other attempts at this project but yet to see any that produce good results.

Path to Failure

Played with Perceptual Hashes (then read about how they work and abandoned this path).

Moved to Grid of Histograms: Divide source and input images into grids and generate / compare Histograms.

Switched from HSV to LAB / LUV color spaces for a more human perception of color.

Switched from Instagram to Flickr for source images(Insta is filled with images of text).